What could be sweeter than a Hershey’s Kiss? More Hershey’s Kisses. The company behind the iconic Hershey’s, Reese’s, Twizzlers, and Kisses brands is transforming its North American retail execution capabilities with Salesforce. According to Richard Primus, Senior Director Global Commercial Systems, “Salesforce helps our field sales reps bring valuable insights to our retail partners every day.” The Hershey Company has 1,300+ field representatives who explore consultative selling, merchandising, and promotional opportunities on a store-by-store basis, within the grocery, convenience, and large retailer channels across the U.S. and Canada. In the past, Hershey’s used a custom device that was challenging to maintain and didn’t provide a means for reps to actively interact with key decision-makers at the store level. To give the field sales reps greater visibility into their business and help them execute merchandising ideas more effectively, the company built a custom mobile app on the Salesforce platform. Reps now have instant access to planning tools, near real-time analytics, brand and promotional materials, and marketing insights, right from their smartphones or tablets. “Apps aren’t valuable if they aren’t embraced and adopted by your team,” says Primus. “With Salesforce App Cloud, we were able to deliver a customised and highly engaging front-end experience that’s tailored to the way that we do business. Our field sales team loves that the app was designed and built specifically for them and how they work.” Hershey’s reps can have more robust conversations with retailers, share business information, and adapt how they interact with customers on the spot. In addition to helping them quickly find videos and other sales tools they need, the app lets reps view route analytics, drill into store level point-of-sale insights, review call history, and access and maintain key contact data. The benefits go beyond just the bottom line. “In addition to increasing sales and delivering a professional and differentiated experience to our retail partners, the app is an investment in developing our current and future sales talent,” explains Primus. “We plan to expand Salesforce across multiple route-to-market opportunities, including possible social marketing integration.”

Hershey’s uses SAP for their HR and Finance, and they integrate SAP with Salesforce. “Everything we have on premise plus all the applications that exist in the cloud now connect,” says Primus. Hershey’s originally selected Salesforce because of its cloud architecture. “We also wanted to reduce the load on our support center and lower our supply cost. People used to print anywhere from 100–300 pages of paper every week, which got expensive with 500–600 people. Integration has helped us eliminate those costs.”

Toyota’s workforce is based in 170 countries around the world — making coordination tricky. Today, Toyota’s hundreds of thousands of staff use Salesforce to swap advice and answers at any hour of the day.

By making sales more efficient, Merck gets vital products to its customers in record time. “Salesforce makes us smarter — and smarter means better for our customers,” says Christian Stuppy, Director of Global Marketing.